Köllewood - Cologne ATProto
@koellewood.bsky.social ·
"Android beta access is not available yet." - At least its planned (so 2 instead of one star ; if planned i will re-review it
About
Capture the moment while staying in it! Presently takes the photo and posts it to your atmosphere story without sucking you into a feed. Live in beta on iOS with Android coming soon!
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I'm Finding "New Siri" Rather Lackluster and—Honestly—I Think Most People WillWhere Does Siri AI Even Work?
A lot of the reason that Siri being way smarter is lackluster for me is that I just don't use that many Apple services in any meaningful way. And the thing is: most people don't. Most people spend their workdays in Gmail, Slack, Teams, and Outlook, not iMessage or Calendar. There are certainly ways for people to get their calendars and emails into Apple's offerings, it's not like they're not supporting standards for email and calendar events, but that's not the whole problem either.
Difficulties In the Enterprise—My Use
One of the things that's difficult for me is that my job is based on very proprietary knowledge—the only place you can actually access some of this information is by having access to our internal docs and our internal MCP. I also deal with a lot of PHI (Protected Health Information) in my job, so basically nothing can leave my devices without very special care being taken. We've got connectors to Claude and ChatGPT that we can use for non-GDPR data in a secure manner, but Apple has nothing like that.
Outside the Enterprise—For Devs and Users
Outside of the enterprise, it's still difficult for people to actually interact with Siri AI. For one, app support is going to be entirely up to the developers on whether or not they build out for Siri's custom interactions with the apps. App Intents are not an MCP server and, even if you've built out a full MCP server and CLI for your app to interact with agents, you're going to have to do it all again—from scratch—to work on iPhone.
Apple's lack of support here is another kick in the crotch to developers (and to users) who want things to be accessible. There's a defined standard for this. MCP exists to connect agents to apps. Without implementing this in Siri, its integrations are going to be severely limited for users.
Other Agents Work Literally Everywhere
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-shareLook at this graph (cue Nickelback meme). Can you actually see where the macOS line is? It's following—and falling behind—the Linux line. Interestingly enough, though, OS X (versions of macOS from before 2016) is still going much stronger than macOS is. Safe to say, Macs still aren't that popular. This means most people aren't going to be able to use Siri on a desktop computer, making it much less useful for anything that people have actually found useful with AI agents, which is mostly in the workplace.
My ChatGPT subscription works everywhere. It works on my Windows laptop I'm typing on right now while pretending to work, it works on my Linux laptop sitting in front of me while I also pretend to work, but on that laptop, and it works on my iPhone sitting next to me. It's got connections to all of my tools from GitHub and Linear to Apple Health and Hevy. None of this works for Siri (save for the Apple Health integration).
Fixing the Problem
This problem's going to persist until developers put more support into their apps (IF developers put more support into their apps), but even then, it only gets you so far. Apple simply refuses to acknowledge that the web exists, which is where most productivity happens these days. Until Apple's willing to open up to that idea, Siri is always going to be limited to the people who are all in on iPad and iPhone. Mac users will see some benefit, but nowhere near the same kinds of benefits as most of the Mac is also on the web.
Ultimately, Siri AI cannot succeed until Apple relinquishes some control and opens its operating systems to make use of established standards like MCP, ACP, and—well—the open web. Otherwise, this is all going to continue to happen without them. We're all here on ATProto and ActivityPub, we know that the web is the future. It's time for Apple to realize that too.Aug 3, 2026
Everything Is MarketingOkay so one thing people mistake often is that advertising and marketing are not the same thing. Marketing is everything about a product and everything about the people around the product. If you can see it publicly, then it's marketing.
That brand that's "not like the others" because they have open hardware or are privacy-focused with their software? That's marketing. The whole ethos and mission of a company is marketing. That does not mean that it's empty and just to sell a product.
Everything I do on the atmosphere is marketing. I run blogs because I like to yap, but I choose the platforms on which I blog because they are built on ATProto. Does that mean I don't care about blogging? No. Does that mean I don't care about ATProto? Also no. It's just that the decisions I made with which platform I was going to host my blogs was because I care about the Atmosphere.
My online personality isn't an act, it's not necessarily my 100% real self, but it's parts of me that I want to show to the internet. That's also marketing. I'm marketing myself as a kinda goofy, fun developer who likes to try out different ideas and see what works. I'm not about shipping the most polished software, I'm about shipping things that solve problems and serve as explorations on what we can do with the protocol.
So when you think about the products that you care about, and the products builders care about, remember that this all plays into marketing. It's subtle, and it's natural, but it affects how you perceive the products. And that's really what marketing is.Jul 22, 2026
How Long Did It Take For People to Meaningfully Notice My AI Profile Picture?The "What"
So I do a lot of talking about AI, it's a very popular technology right now, so there's a lot going on with it. It's permeated every bit of our lives in some way and, while it's certainly an interesting technology, it's got a lot of people on edge.
One of the big problems that AI causes is in AI generated images. Because people can generate almost any image, it's very easy to fake events. It's to the point where even a photo of Mitch McConnell in the hospital is scrutinized for potential AI tampering (it wasn't). This has lead people to speak out against AI imagery and point it out when it's not labelled as such. So with that I thought I'd go and do an interesting little social experiment: I would use my own AI imagery to see whether people would actually point it out as such.
> Disclaimer: This is not a scientific study, nor is it evidence for anything. This was purely anecdotal and for the sake of entertainment and a little bit of social anthropology. Do not interpret anything in this blog post written by some dude with too much time on their hands as anything other than pure curiosity.
The Experiment
Preparation
So, a couple of months ago I swapped from a profile picture that was my Memoji, a cartoon persona you can make on Apple devices, to an AI-generated image of myself. I didn't just want it to guess, so I gave it an actual image of myself on which it could base its own output. The photo I chose—my current profile picture—was one that I actually took myself and then passed to the model as a reference.
Execution
Once I had the image generated, I swapped my profile picture and said nothing about it. Over the next couple of months, pretty much nothing happened. Nobody said anything about the profile picture and I just went about my day. After a while, I swapped out the original image for something a little more obviously AI-generated. Instead of basing it on a real picture of me, I fed the model the original AI-generated image and explicitly prompted it to make it look more cartoonish. I swapped that one in and went about my business.
Criteria for Noticing The Image
Now, I'm not going to say that people didn't notice my AI profile picture at all, the criteria here is "meaningfully notice" in a way that's actually measurable. Effectively, I'm just waiting around for someone to actually comment on it. I can't read minds, so someone's got to be outward about it.
When People Started to Call It Out
For the longest time, nobody actually went about calling it out. Again, most people went about their days posting and interacting with my content online. Nobody was outwardly bothered by it. That is, until people got mad at things I said.
The particular post that actually got someone to comment on my profile picture was this one right here, posted on The Fourth of July.
While I'm not quite sure what about this post prompted this particular response, it was the first time someone actually made a comment about the post, so it was finally a turning point in my little social experiment.
One clarification that I'd like to make is that I wasn't hiding the fact that the image was AI-generated, I was simply not saying anything unless someone explicitly brought it up.
Here, I was the first person to suggest that it was because of some kind of AI detection.
The End of the Experiment
The conclusion of the actual experiment actually came not long after the above interaction, interestingly enough. A while back, GitHub had posted a link to a blog written by a neurodivergent C-suite exec and their experience using AI as an assistive tool in getting their job done.
My response was this:
That one seemed to get people mad (and also was proved right by most of their responses), but at some point, this post had resurfaced earlier this week and got a lot more interaction. People calling out the profile picture as if that somehow invalidated anything I had to say.
> Note: nothing I said actually was defending GitHub
Thoughts
So I find it particularly interesting that people didn't seem to really even care that the images were AI generated until they wanted to use it as a arguing point. I don't really have an actual conclusion about any of this, but I feel like there is something to be said that nobody really seemed to comment on the images until this point.
Anyway, I've put my profile picture back to the actual picture of me and I figured I'd write this blog post about it. I'm not trying to draw a conclusion about anti-AI sentiment here, I'm really just chronicling a particular experience I had with AI image generation tools. Make of that what you will.Jul 19, 2026
